As the fundamental unit of selection, one of my primary research objectives is to understand how individual variation translates into fitness differences, and therefore pattern, at the level of interactions between insect populations, species, and communities, and their environment. I focus on traits relating to resource and habitat use in herbivores because relative fitness and environmental heterogeneity are both defined in part by the same factor, i.e., resource diversity and distribution, which facilitates study of environment/fitness dynamics. I explore the multiple genetic versus environmental components that underlie such traits in order to make predictions about evolutionary trajectories and to recreate evolutionary histories. A broad goal is to identify general phenomena with relevance beyond a specific model system, e.g., what factors promote evolution of resource specialization versus generalization and how does local genetic pattern and process integrate at the scale of landscapes and species. I am currently evaluating which life-history traits characterize Ghana's at-risk forest-endemic butterfly species with an aim towards identifying, 1) how these traits specifically impact fitness and increase species' vulnerability to fragmentation and 2) the key causal agents at work on them. Overriding objectives are to resolve which life-history traits dictate "winners" and "losers" with respect to species persistence and extinction in human-transformed landscapes and how these promote biotic homogenization across ecosystem boundaries, and to apply this knowledge to help steer limited conservation resources.

Other research interests within the broad focal theme of evolutionary ecology include plasticity and adaptive constraints, and the quantitative genetics of dispersal propensity and, therefore, gene flow. Dispersal as an evolving trait has important theoretical and practical implications with respect to our current understanding of genetic pattern and population interdependence. Habitat fragmentation and isolation, for example, could drive the evolution of “sedentary” populations. I am also piqued by conflicting theoretical predictions of evolution of genetic variation in populations at the periphery of their range versus those more centrally located. On the one hand, greater environmental stochasticity and heterogeneity experienced by edge populations relative to interior populations is expected to maintain quantitative trait variation in edge populations. However, peripheral populations generally consist of fewer individuals and are more isolated, relative to core populations, and thus reduced genetic variation is predicted. Comparative study of pattern and process in peripheral versus interior populations could resolve this apparent paradox and reveal key predictors (if they exist) of species' range distributions and the dynamics of species invasions or range collapse.